Why do some attempts to conclude alliance treaties end in failure? From the inability of European powers to form an alliance that would stop Hitler in the 1930s, to the present inability of Ukraine ...to join NATO, states frequently attempt but fail to form alliance treaties. In Arguing about Alliances, Paul Poast sheds new light on the purpose of alliance treaties by recognizing that such treaties come from negotiations, and that negotiations can end in failure. In a book that bridges Stephen Walt's Origins of Alliance and Glenn Snyder's Alliance Politics, two classic works on alliances, Poast identifies two conditions that result in non-agreement: major incompatibilities in the internal war plans of the participants, and attractive alternatives to a negotiated agreement for various parties to the negotiations. As a result, Arguing about Alliances focuses on a group of states largely ignored by scholars: states that have attempted to form alliance treaties but failed. Poast suggests that to explain the outcomes of negotiations, specifically how they can end without agreement, we must pay particular attention to the wartime planning and coordinating functions of alliance treaties. Through his exploration of the outcomes of negotiations from European alliance negotiations between 1815 and 1945, Poast offers a typology of alliance treaty negotiations and establishes what conditions are most likely to stymie the attempt to formalize recognition of common national interests.
The Cold War shaped the world we live in today - its politics, economics, and military affairs. This book shows how the globalization of the Cold War during the last century created the foundations ...for most of the key conflicts we see today, including the War on Terror. It focuses on how the Third World policies of the two twentieth-century superpowers - the United States and the Soviet Union - gave rise to resentments and resistance that in the end helped topple one superpower and still seriously challenge the other. Ranging from China to Indonesia, Iran, Ethiopia, Angola, Cuba, and Nicaragua, it provides a truly global perspective on the Cold War. And by exploring both the development of interventionist ideologies and the revolutionary movements that confronted interventions, the book links the past with the present in ways that no other major work on the Cold War era has succeeded in doing.
Why did the nation-state emerge and proliferate across the globe? How is this process related to the wars fought in the modern era? Analyzing datasets that cover the entire world over long stretches ...of time, Andreas Wimmer focuses on changing configurations of power and legitimacy to answer these questions. The nationalist ideal of self-rule gradually diffused over the world and delegitimized empire after empire. Nationalists created nation-states wherever the power configuration favored them, often at the end of prolonged wars of secession. The elites of many of these new states were institutionally too weak for nation-building and favored their own ethnic communities. Ethnic rebels challenged such exclusionary power structures in violation of the principles of self-rule, and neighboring governments sometimes intervened into these struggles over the state. Waves of War demonstrates why nation-state formation and ethnic politics are crucial to understand the civil and international wars of the past 200 years.
This book provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and holistic analysis of the socio-psychological dynamics of intractable conflicts. Daniel Bar-Tal's original conceptual framework is supported ...by evidence drawn from different disciplines, including empirical data and illustrative case studies. His analysis rests on the premise that intractable conflicts share certain socio-psychological foundations, despite differences in context and other characteristics. He describes a full cycle of intractable conflicts - their outbreak, escalation and reconciliation through peace building. Bar-Tal's framework provides a broad theoretical view of the of the socio-psychological repertoire that develops in the course of long-term and violent conflicts, outlines the factors affecting its formation, demonstrates how it is maintained, points out its functions and describes its consequences. The book also elaborates on the contents, processes and other factors involved in the peace building process.
Ethnic conflict often focuses on culturally charged symbols and rituals that evoke strong emotions from all sides. Marc Howard Ross examines battles over diverse cultural expressions, including ...Islamic headscarves in France, parades in Northern Ireland, holy sites in Jerusalem and Confederate flags in the American South to propose a psychocultural framework for understanding ethnic conflict, as well as barriers to, and opportunities for, its mitigation. His analysis explores how culture frames interests, structures demand-making and shapes how opponents can find common ground to produce constructive outcomes to long-term disputes. He focuses on participants' accounts of conflict to identify emotionally significant issues, and the power of cultural expressions to link individuals to larger identities and shape action. Ross shows that, contrary to popular belief, culture does not necessarily exacerbate conflict; rather, the constructed nature of psychocultural narratives can facilitate successful conflict mitigation through the development of more inclusive narratives and identities.
Contemporary debates give the impression that the presence of immigrants necessarily spells strife. Yet as Immigration and Conflict in Europe shows, the incidence of conflict involving immigrants and ...their descendants has varied widely across groups, cities, and countries. The book presents a theory to account for this uneven pattern, explaining why we observe clashes between immigrants and natives in some locations but not in others and why some cities experience confrontations between immigrants and state actors while others are spared from such conflicts. The book addresses how economic conditions interact with electoral incentives to account for immigrant-native and immigrant-state conflict across groups and cities within Great Britain as well as across Germany and France. It highlights the importance of national immigration regimes and local political economies in shaping immigrants' economic position and political behavior, demonstrating how economic and electoral forces, rather than cultural differences, determine patterns of conflict and calm.
Rebellion, insurgency, civil war-conflict within a society is customarily treated as a matter of domestic politics and analysts generally focus their attention on local causes. Yet fighting between ...governments and opposition groups is rarely confined to the domestic arena. "Internal" wars often spill across national boundaries, rebel organizations frequently find sanctuaries in neighboring countries, and insurgencies give rise to disputes between states.
InRebels without Borders, which will appeal to students of international and civil war and those developing policies to contain the regional diffusion of conflict, Idean Salehyan examines transnational rebel organizations in civil conflicts, utilizing cross-national datasets as well as in-depth case studies. He shows how external Contra bases in Honduras and Costa Rica facilitated the Nicaraguan civil war and how the Rwandan civil war spilled over into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fostering a regional war. He also looks at other cross-border insurgencies, such as those of the Kurdish PKK and Taliban fighters in Pakistan. Salehyan reveals that external sanctuaries feature in the political history of more than half of the world's armed insurgencies since 1945, and are also important in fostering state-to-state conflicts.
Rebels who are unable to challenge the state on its own turf look for mobilization opportunities abroad. Neighboring states that are too weak to prevent rebel access, states that wish to foster instability in their rivals, and large refugee diasporas provide important opportunities for insurgent groups to establish external bases. Such sanctuaries complicate intelligence gathering, counterinsurgency operations, and efforts at peacemaking. States that host rebels intrude into negotiations between governments and opposition movements and can block progress toward peace when they pursue their own agendas.
•A history of territorial struggles strengthened the ability of some groups of indigenous peoples in Brazil to combat COVID-19.•Indigenous led self-protection and resistance counter government ...‘politics of extermination’ and ‘genocide by omission'.•Strategies included: self-isolation and blockades, social media campaigns and fundraising, and court cases against the government.•Despite violence and repression, the indigenous movement has grown and is better positioned to fight the pandemic than it was a decade ago.
Indigenous peoples in Brazil have suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic due to limited access to an already precarious public health system together with continued attacks on their cultures, their territories and their way of life. These attacks come as part of the government's attempts to further neoliberal development and undermine environmental and indigenous rights, taking advantage of what the Minister of Environment called 'a moment of calm while the press is focusing on the pandemic'. The pandemic has intensified environmental conflicts affecting indigenous peoples, both in amplifying conflicts but also in sparking new acts of resistance and self-protection of indigenous lives and territories. Based on case studies and monitoring of rapidly evolving social media and WhatsApp posts, we analyse these processes through a political ecology lens. We find confirmed cases and deaths amongst indigenous peoples centred around tourism hotspots, mining sites, and other development projects. Yet the presence of these risks, and long term conflicts related to land-grabbing and resource theft linked to said development, has in some cases strengthened community ties and increased capacity for active resistance. While some Mebengokrê (Kayapó) communities in the Amazon have fled further into the forest to maintain isolation, others have expelled gold-miners from their villages. Tupinambá and Pataxó communities in the Northeast have set up blockades to keep people, and the virus, out. The retomadas, or reclaiming of land, of the Tupinambá, Pataxó and Pataxó-Hãhãhai in Bahia State, are a case in point: the long-term struggle to reclaim their lands has strengthened community ties and capacity for active resistance. The recent road blockades of the Mebengokrê (Kayapó) incorporated demands for COVID-19 support into a long history of demands for compensation for the negative impacts suffered from mining and road construction in their territories. At the national level, indigenous movements, which have grown in strength and number in the fight against Bolsonaro's 'politics of extermination' and through engagement of a new cohort of indigenous youth who had access to higher education, were able to draw on social media and indigenous led court cases to help counteract the 'genocide by omission' that has been worsened by the pandemic.
